The Four Rs of Revision
Review

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Review

Planning your revision is essential if you are going to fulfill your potential. As the saying goes failing to plan in planning to fail. We’ve pulled together some useful advice to get your revision off to the best start.

Know the course

Before you start it’s a good idea to know what you need to revise! Your teacher might have given you an outline of the course or PLCs (that’s fancy teacher talk for personal learning checklists). If not ask them if they have them available to you. If not, you can download the specification for your GCSE course to see exactly what it covers. There are links below to the main GCSE Geography courses:

Blank Page

Blank page is a strategy for checking what you already recall about your revision topic. It is an active revision technique that encourages you to think about what you can remember from your studies and encourages you to organise your knowledge and understanding. Take a look at our guide to blank paging if this is your first time.

Short Answer Questions

Complete a series of short answer questions to identify your strengths and areas for development. This will help you prioritise your revision.

Identify Priorities and Create a Revision Plan

GCSE Geography specifications are pretty big! There’s a lot of content to get through. This is why it is a good idea to start your revision early.

We recommend refining the content and focussing revision around areas you feel less confident about or did not perform well in during mock exams or other assessments. Go through your past assessments and identify the areas you need to focus your revision on. You can now go through the specification or your PLCs and colour code each area to show how confident you are based on your past assessments. You could RAG (red, amber, green) rate them.

Once you know the areas you need to particularly work on, it is time to put together a revision plan. This will be an outline of what you will revise and when. Your revision will be most effective if you plan to revisit topics regularly. This helps build your memory.

There are several ways you can create a revision plan. You could:

download a blank calendar (daily, weekly and monthly planners available on the BBC)
download an app e.g. My Study Life – School Panner – Apple, Todait – Apple | Android
use a calendar on your mobile device e.g. Google Calendar and set up notifications to keep you going

We recently shared a revision question calendar for geography teachers to download. You could download and adapt it yourself.